Who are you?
I don’t know who you are, exactly, but if you’re reading this, you probably have some sort of interest in design. Maybe you like to think about why things are designed the way they are (theory), or want to use it to enact change out there in the real world (praxis), or somewhere on the vast continuum in between. Maybe you grew up with Bauhaus or De Stijl in your bones, and design is in your blood. Or maybe, like me, you ended up here after a lifetime of detours, with design as the common red thread through them all.
In any case, we face each other at this altar, you and me and the ordaining force of design, and I’m asking you who you are. I’m asking because I’m not entirely sure who I am and what I want to create in the world. “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” (Dickenson, 1865).
Design helps me figure it out, though. We “become human through design” (Fry, 2012). It’s very natural for us to want to impose order on chaos. It’s satisfying and life-purpose-giving, even. Design is a mindset, an attitude. Design is simply the act of iteration, as far as I’m concerned. It’s “changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1969). I guess I do a lot of design, then. In fact, nearly everything touches design: it’s a “remarkably supple discipline, amenable to radically different interpretations in philosophy as well as in practice” (Buchanan, 1992).
If we extrapolate design as “all that we do, almost all the time” (Papanek, 1985), though, it quickly gets overwhelming. Design panism - the idea that “everything is design” and “everyone is a designer” - is an idea that renders design so ubiquitous and amorphous that its meaning is lost (Lorusso, 2024). If everything is design, nothing is design.
What I’m interested in, rather, is design as an internal process. Not just vormgeving (form-giving) to external objects and processes, but as a process of introspection. “Design can be conceived as a force, one that subjects [designers] to design” (Lorusso, 2024). What is the nature of this force that shapes us? Who are we before we are shaped, before the act of design, before action itself?
To explore this we can look to phenomenology, an attempt to understand the world beginning from lived experience. It’s a science of the “first person perspective” (Luft & Overgaard, 2011), seeking to understand experience as interpreted by human consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology centers the “lived body” as the site where individuals gain access to the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1989).
This embodiment is key to understanding human thinking and experience. We become aware of ourselves as bodies, reflecting on our lived experiences in order to “characterize how we as humans are engaged with the world through different forms of intentionality” (Poulsen & Thøgersen, 2011). In other words, we are conscious of our own existence as part of the larger world around it. To be embodied is not simply to have a body - it is to be a body.
In design, we learn that embodiment is crucial. We are taught “thinking through making,” and to “trust the process,” essentially trusting that our bodies possess knowledge that our minds don’t. The process involves taking steps without knowing what comes next, led by the dark flashlight of intuition. Tim Ingold speaks of creation as an “ongoing generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory, and rhythmic” (Ingold, 2009). Making, then, is a practice of “weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld.”
Design, in this light, can be seen as the “force” described by Lorusso that we as designers become condition to, rather than instigators of. To design is to enter into a relationship with embodied experience. Phenomenology insists on this primacy: that all making and doing begins in the lived body, and the designer is not separate from the world they try to shape. Before design, I am a person in a body, a self subject to sculpture, a process evolving and transformed by the actions that I take.
So before you go out there as a designer and enact the change on the portion of the world that only you can, to which design hands you the keys, forget the grandiosity of your mission. Forget that capital-D Design is part of everything and release the pressure of the world on your shoulders. You don’t need to design everything. Notice the way the little flower peeks out of the gate. Observe a parent’s love for their child. Before design, you are alive.
References
- Dickinson, E. (1865). Letter to Mrs. Samuel Bowles. In T. H. Johnson (Ed.), The letters of Emily Dickinson (1958). Harvard University.
- Fry, T. (2012). Becoming human by design. Bloomsbury.
- Simon, H. A. (1969). The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press.
- Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1511637
- Papanek, V. (1985). Design for the real world: Human ecology and social change (2nd ed.). Thames & Hudson.
- Lorusso, S. (2024). What design can’t do. Set Margins’. https://silviolorusso.com/writing/what-design-cant-do
- Luft, S., & Overgaard, S. (Eds.). (2011). The Routledge companion to phenomenology. Routledge.
- Merleau-Ponty, M. (1989). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
- Poulsen, S. V., & Thøgersen, J. F. (2011). Design anthropology and the situated body. In Gunn, W., Otto, T., & Smith, R. C. (Eds.), Design anthropological futures. Bloomsbury Academic.
- Ingold, T. (2009). The textility of making. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep042